by Ted Mooney
Wieselhoff hesitated, then laid down his knife and fork. “If I may speak frankly?”
“Please.”
“He worries for your safety. He didn’t go into detail, but rumor has reached him that someone claiming connection to you is involved in a cross-border crime, possibly kidnapping.” Wieselhoff raised a placatory hand. “Understand: Kolya knows you could never be involved in such a thing—as do I, of course, as do I. But still he worries.”
Turner nodded affably. “Sure, I see. And who am I supposed to have kidnapped?”
“Not you. No one thinks that.”
Turner waited.
“It could be one person,” Wieselhoff allowed, choosing his words carefully. “It could be possibly a truckful. This is the rumor.”
“Aha.” Recalling what the Russians had told Odile about people being smuggled out of Belarus, Turner grew momentarily despondent, though he did his best to conceal it. “Really, Horst, I’m just no good at these things. Did Kolya say what I should do?”
“No, no. He only wanted to be sure you knew, so you could take precautions.”
“Okay, then. Thanks for the heads-up.” But Turner harbored no illusions about Kukushkin’s message, its purpose was plain, and though he was quick to steer the conversation to other topics as the waiter cleared the dishes and brought coffee, though he listened attentively to Wieselhoff’s plans to exhibit his recent acquisitions at a well-regarded Kunsthalle in Basel later that month, he knew that if he really proposed to save himself—let alone Odile, who as yet had small interest in his help, or anyone else’s, if he read her correctly—he would have to do some very inventive market positioning indeed, starting at once.
“Horst,” he said, “you asked to be informed if more of those Soviet May Day flags turned up. I have a small group coming to auction—this will be the last of them—but I’m prepared to let you have one now at the same price Balakian’s buyers paid, with a single proviso.”
The collector brightened. “Tell me.”
“If I sell the flag to you, I’d like you to show it with the rest of your new acquisitions in Basel, giving it equal prominence. This would be mutually beneficial, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
Wieselhoff’s eyes grew moist with emotion. “When can I see them?” he said.
Turner called for the check.
Back at the auction house, he allowed Wieselhoff to choose his favorite of four medium-sized flags, and in return Wieselhoff wrote him a personal check for 210,000 francs. Then, after Gabriella had rolled the flag into a cylinder, wrapped it twice in butcher paper, and tied it up with twine, Turner sent this satisfied customer out into the afternoon with his purchase—even though Turner knew that no collector, however fortunate, however Swiss, could truthfully be described as satisfied.
“What do you bet he’ll be back for the auction?” he asked Gabriella.
But she just shook her head and busied herself with other things.
Turner spent the rest of the afternoon consolidating his gains. He drafted a press release announcing the flags’ impending sale, placed a few discreet calls to his best media contacts, letting them know what to expect, and wrote a private memo on the subject to the director of the auction house. The thing was coming together. He’d taken risks, yes, but with a steady hand and a willingness to improvise he would soon see a handsome return on his investment—as much as five million francs, after the house commission. And yet Wieselhoff’s message from Kukushkin—or what Turner understood the message to be—weighed unpleasantly on his mind. It occurred to him that a prudent man in his position might do well to acquire the means to defend himself. A small handgun, for instance. He’d never use it, of course, but using it was not the issue. Morale was the issue.
He waited until Gabriella had departed for the day before calling the brothers Battini, the Corsican pair he’d sent to ransack Odile’s apartment, and to Marco, the elder and marginally less excitable of the two, he described his needs. After some back and forth in which Marco tried to persuade him to place his safety in the hands of contract professionals, experienced individuals such as himself and his brother Pasquale, he finally agreed to meet Turner at Parc des Buttes Chaumont in two hours’ time, near the top of the steps inside the park’s west entrance.
At six o’clock Turner left the auction house, withdrew four thousand francs from a cash machine on rue la Boétie, and walked east on boulevard Haussmann. Passing the Opéra, he picked up rue Lafayette and continued east at a businesslike clip, periodically switching from one side of the street to the other in an attempt to discover if he was being followed. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t.
Arriving early at Buttes Chaumont, he decided to take a short turn around the grounds, a former quarry and garbage dump that Baron Haussmann had transformed into a hilltop arcadia complete with an artificial grotto, a lake, and a classical pavilion. There were a fair number of people about—the park stayed open until eleven—and Turner found their presence reassuring and worrisome in equal measure. He crossed the Pont des Suicidés, ninety feet above the lake, and found an empty bench near the appointed spot. Sacré-Coeur glowed white in the distance. Overhead, storm clouds gathered.
Marco Battini arrived some twenty minutes late, carrying a black nylon gym bag and a rolled-up newspaper. As the sky continued to darken, people left the park in a steady stream, filing past the bench Turner had chosen, and Battini indicated with a toss of his head that they should seek a more secluded spot. When they were sheltered under two large gingko trees, he unzipped the gym bag and extracted an object wrapped in red cloth. “Go ahead,” he said, offering him the bundle. “See if you like it.”
Turner gingerly unwrapped the object, careful not to touch it directly. He knew little about handguns—the only other he’d actually seen was the revolver pressed to his temple some years ago by the unhappy buyer in TriBeCa—but he was relieved to see that this one looked nothing like that.
“Nine-millimeter semiautomatic German-make,” Battini informed him. “Top of the line.” He took the gun and released the magazine catch to show that it was loaded. “Fifteen rounds, sixteen if you keep one chambered.” He pushed the clip neatly home. “Never jams. Cost to you: thirty-five hundred.”
“Is it clean?” Turner asked.
“Clean and sterile.” Battini turned the gun over slowly to demonstrate that its exterior serial numbers had been obliterated. “Same on the inside. Want to try it out?”
“Here?”
Battini laughed. “Suit yourself. But this weapon’s going to make you very happy, I guarantee it.” He handed the gun to Turner, then reached again into the gym bag and brought out a small cardboard box. “And because we’ve done business before, I’ll throw in some extra ammo.” He shoved the box at him impatiently. “So that’s thirty-five hundred cash. You brought it, right?”
Turner laid the gun and ammunition on the bench beside him and produced the money, which Battini flip-counted before stuffing it into his jacket pocket. “Good,” he said.
Both men rose, and as they shook hands Turner thought he saw a glint of genuine curiosity in the Corsican’s eyes. Other people’s troubles, he supposed.
“Use it in good health, Monsieur,” said Battini, not unkindly. Then, seizing the gym bag and newspaper, he padded off down the darkening path.
Turner hadn’t anticipated the problem of transporting the weapon—somehow he’d imagined it would come in its own carrying case—but after fumbling with it for a few panicky seconds he jammed it into the waistband of his trousers, in back where his jacket would cover it. Then he picked up the box of cartridges and, feeling curiously lightheaded, set out for the park’s east gate. The sky had grown very dark, and there were glimmers of lightning.
Once on the street, he flagged down a taxi, which delivered him to his building in Bastille just as the heavens opened. In the short dash to the entrance he was drenched. He punched in the access code, rode the elevator to his floor, and let himself into his apartme
nt.
Leaving the gun and cartridges on the kitchen table, he changed into dry clothes, then poured a glass of scotch and took it into the living room. Forked lightning sundered the skies, sending tremendous thunderclaps through the ozone-charged air and rattling the apartment windows until he feared they’d shatter. He left the lights off and pulled up a chair to watch.
Years ago, hiking with friends in the White Mountains, he’d seen someone nearly electrocuted in a lightning storm. Having been caught more or less in the open, on a meadow plateau between two rocky rises, the man had sought shelter in a slight depression in the ground, thinking to present less of a target there. But he’d been mistaken. The current already running through the ground used his body to bridge the depression, and for two or three seconds he was encased in a crackling blue suit of light that was as terrible as anything Turner ever expected to see. The man had survived, but barely. The story had no moral, and Turner disliked being reminded of it.
By eight o’clock the center of the storm had passed. He prepared a supper of leftover fusilli putanesca and salad, washed down with a half bottle of chianti. Afterward he examined the gun closely, removing the clip and inspecting the firing mechanism until he understood it, then stowed both gun and cartridges in the bottom drawer of his dresser, with his socks, where he hoped never to see them again. So much for self-defense, he thought.
Still restless, he tried reading—he’d recently taken up Montaigne’s essays, as much for companionship as for mental stimulation—but the very naturalness of the prose seemed to rebuke him at every pass, and he couldn’t stay with it. Instead he poured himself another drink and began walking around his apartment like a stranger, inspecting his possessions for clues to what it was he was always looking for, as if knowing might help. The fragmentary Greek kouros, the African stool, the Japanese screen, the Egyptian heads. He was drawn to them because they were beautiful, though that did not, he couldn’t help but note, make them indispensable. Far from it. They were beautiful, and that was all.
He paused before an eighteenth-century Venetian mirror he’d acquired two years ago in a trade. It was narrow—the glass just five inches wide by thirteen high—and ornately framed in carved wood painted pink and gold. Beneath it hung a matching pendant, flush to the wall and shaped like half a pedestal, on which three votive-style candles stood clustered. He lit them and saw his face illuminated from below like a face by Caravaggio, melodramatic, violent, blood-smart. It spooked him but did not instruct. Maybe, he thought, he wasn’t in a learning frame of mind.
He went into the bedroom and turned on the television. The public-affairs channel was running a documentary about a guerrilla insurgency in Myanmar, a hundred and fifty men led by two nine-year-old twin boys their followers regarded as divinities. The boys were radical ascetics, wore fatigues many sizes too big for them, and smoked cigars with the lit ends in their mouths. Finding them hardly less taxing than Montaigne, if for opposite reasons, Turner was about to change channels when he heard, from the front of the apartment, a faint disturbance. He muted the TV to listen, but could make out nothing further until three knocks sounded, somewhat tentatively, at his twice-locked front door.
He was on his feet before he knew it. Whoever wanted in knew the downstairs entry code and ought by rights to be a friend. But he was expecting no one, and his situation didn’t lend itself to spontaneous drop-ins.
“Just a moment, please!” he called.
Barefoot, he went to his dresser, opened the bottom drawer, took out the gun, and, giving it a wary once-over, racked the slide. So, he thought. So so so so.
His visitor knocked again, this time with more resolve.
“Coming!” he called, and walked to the front hallway, where he stopped to listen. “Who is it?” he asked. “Who’s there?”
There was a silence, followed by what could only be full-body blows to the door, someone throwing himself repeatedly against it in a rage of impatience. For a moment Turner considered shooting right through the door, never mind the consequences, but something persuaded him not to, and instead he undid the locks and cautiously opened it.
Odile stood framed there for an instant, then walked coolly past him into the apartment. “Hello,” she said.
She was soaking wet, her hair plastered to her cheeks and forehead, her blouse translucent, the hem of her skirt dripping water onto the floor. Turner could make no sense of what he saw until he remembered the rain. He closed the door still holding the gun, but it had been pointed at the floor the whole time. Odile ignored it completely.
“I thought you were someone else,” he explained feebly. And then: “Where’s your umbrella?”
She spoke abruptly, not bothering to hide her irritation. “Don’t ask stupid questions.” Putting her purse down on the floor, she scooped her hair away from her face with both hands, sending water droplets flying. “What time is it?”
He checked his watch. “Ten-ten.”
“We’d better hurry, then. I have to get back.” She stepped out of her heels and, leaving them where they were, walked down the hall as if she’d passed down it many times before.
“Back?” he repeated. Each word he spoke left him feeling stupider than the last.
“To my husband,” she said over her shoulder.
Mute, wreathed in unknowing, he followed slowly after her. By the time he reached the bedroom, her clothes lay in a small damp pile on the rug.
“Give me that,” she said, pointing at the gun. He gave it to her, and she tossed it across the room into the laundry basket. Then she lay down on his bed, drew the fingers of one hand up between her legs, and said, “So finish it, Turner. Finish what you started.”
He undressed, wordless, and went to her.
CHAPTER 19
THAT WEEK Groot went as planned to Reims to inspect the defunct taxis Rachel had found on the Internet. After an hour of polite conversation with the owner’s widow, he was invited to acquire both vehicles for the sum of forty-two thousand francs, provided he remove them from her property by day’s end. Rachel persuaded her parents to wire her the money, then met Groot in Reims, where they loaded their purchases onto a flatbed truck he had rented for the return trip. At a junkyard just outside of town, they stopped to extract the engines and discard the remains. Then, three tons lighter, they drove straight through to Paris.
Max and Jacques met them in Bastille, at the Bassin de l’Arsenal. There the engines were to be transferred by winch to a small barge that would ferry them out of the marina and down the Seine a short distance to the Nachtvlinder. Worried he might miss the scene, Max had arrived almost two hours early, but waiting had only increased his anxiety. The sheer quantity of human detail seemed to conspire against him at every turn and put his work unconscionably at risk. Now he and Jacques, with the camera on a tripod between them, stood midway down the park side of the marina. They were watching Groot back the rental truck up to the loading dock while Rachel engaged the winch operator, flirting with him in pidgin French. The late-afternoon light gave everything a burnished look.
Max said, “I think it’s time we go on the offensive here.”
Jacques squinted at him, then returned his gaze to the scene spread out before them. “If it can be done, you may be sure we’ll find a way.”
“Better get the other camera, then. I’ll shoot this part from here, but once the engines are loaded I want you to go with Rachel to the Nachtvlinder so we can cover the delivery from that angle. I’ll stick with Groot on the barge. Something tells me he might be ready to share his thoughts with us on camera.”
“What about her?” Jacques asked.
“It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, she says she’s happy they got the engines. On the other …” Max peered briefly through the camera’s viewfinder. “I don’t know. Just try to get her talking. See if she’ll tell you her plans.”
Jacques left. The barge arrived at the mouth of the narrow waterway. As Max watched it edge toward the loading dock, he began pr
eparing himself for the role he would shortly have to play in the proceedings if he really proposed to coax a film from this de facto cast. Actors, nonactors—he should’ve known that in the end it made no difference. The problem was the same. People wanted you to provoke them into becoming who they really were.
He shot the transfer in two takes. In the first, he kept the whole scene in the frame. Rachel climbed onto the truck bed, trussed one engine in a sleeve of chains, and stood back while the winch operator lifted his load, swiveled it out over the barge, and lowered it into Groot’s guiding arms. For the second take, Max stayed focused on Rachel, who secured the second engine as she had the first, gave a thumbs-up, and watched the cargo rise into the air. Max zoomed in until her face filled the frame. She followed the movement of the engine with her eyes—an arc of anxiety that ended, finally, with a tired smile. Then she took off her glasses and, though Max knew she was too nearsighted to see him at this distance, looked straight into the camera for a baleful second before turning away.
He waited until he saw Jacques appear at Rachel’s side with the second camera, then joined them.
“Max!” said Rachel. “I had no idea you were here. Did you film that?”
Ignoring her, he stepped onto the barge, camera and tripod in hand.
“Max?” she repeated uncertainly.
“Don’t worry about him,” Jacques advised, taking her by the elbow. “He’s really busy right now, but I’m still with you. We’re going to the Nachtvlinder, right?” Assuring her that everything would be fine, he shepherded her back toward the truck.
“Congratulations, Groot. You got them after all.” Max vigorously pumped the Dutchman’s plump hand. “You must be very happy.”
“It was a stroke of luck, for certain,” Groot agreed. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped fisherman’s jersey and a gray, flat-brimmed felt hat that made him look like a Netherlandish shaman.
Max’s mood improved a little. “I thought I’d ride along with you, if that’s okay,” he said. “Maybe get you to say a few words for the camera.”
